Lead Backend Engineer (Modeling & Simulation)

Join our team as a Lead Backend Engineer, where you will design, build, and lead the development of core backend services for our platform. This hands-on engineering role requires experience in building enterprise software for modern cloud environments and standalone deployments. You will work closely with various teams to translate product goals and technical constraints into clear backend designs and implementation plans. Additionally, you will mentor engineers, review code, and contribute to architecture discussions.

Design, build, and maintain backend services, APIs, workers, and integration layers, primarily in Python.

About Code Metal

• Private infrastructure
• Disconnected or restricted networks

Responsibilities

• Lead a small team of backend engineers while remaining deeply hands-on in the codebase, providing technical leadership and mentorship.
• Translate product goals, domain requirements, and technical constraints into clear backend designs and implementation plans.
• On-premises deployments
• Django ORM
• Strong SQL and data modeling fundamentals
• Strong understanding of service architecture, domain modeling, API contracts, and backend system design
• Appliance-style deployments
• Experience working with ORMs and migration frameworks such as:
• Alembic
• Customer-managed environments
• Experience designing and implementing backend services, APIs, background workers, and integration layers
• Metrics
• Tracing
• Alerting
• Health checks
• Service dashboards
• Experience with authentication, authorization, RBAC, audit logging, and secure service-to-service communication

Requirements

• Experience building systems that run in production with real reliability, security, deployment, and operational constraints
• Experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL or similar systems
• SQLAlchemy

Or comparable tool

• Experience building or supporting software deployed outside of standard SaaS environments, such as:
• Experience with cloud deployment patterns in AWS, Azure, GCP, or similar environments
• Ability to reason about system boundaries, failure modes, data consistency, observability, and operational support
• Experience leading technical work for a small team, including design guidance, code reviews, mentoring, and delivery ownership
• Ability to convert ambiguous requirements into practical engineering plans and working software
• Strong professional experience as a backend software engineer building production enterprise software

Strong programming ability in Python

• Strong communication skills and comfort working across backend, platform, data, product, and domain teams
• Experience with FastAPI, Flask, Django, or similar Python backend frameworks
• Experience with Pydantic, OpenAPI, JSON Schema, protobuf, or other typed contract systems
• Experience with asynchronous processing, message queues, event-driven systems, or workflow orchestration
• Experience with containerized services using Docker, Kubernetes, or similar platforms
• Experience with deployment models that require strong packaging, reproducibility, versioning, and offline installation support
• Experience building systems for regulated, security-sensitive, defense, government, financial, healthcare, or other enterprise environments
• Structured logging
• Experience helping teams establish engineering practices without adding unnecessary process or slowing delivery

Preferred

Experience with observability tooling such as

• Experience designing systems that integrate with external services, legacy systems, third-party APIs, simulators, data pipelines, or customer-owned infrastructure
• Experience with geospatial systems, simulation systems, planning systems, logistics systems, or other complex operational domains